Specifications

2 Introduction
design more generally would diverge. At that point I decided my
repayment to the community would be in the form of a subset of the
book that worked as a basic Pure Data manual. For those not a ble to
afford a textbook, and for those not needing the entire trea tment of
sound design for interactive applications, I hope this abridged PDF
will b e a useful introduction for Pure Data users.
The remainder of this introductio n rema ins as is, from the first e di-
tion of the published textbook. The book co ntains 650 pages of
material including 3 0 practical exercises for creating s ounds. If you
like Pure Data or other dataflow environments as a tool and you’re
involved in sound for film, video games, radio, TV, theatre, or writ-
ing interactive software then I do suggest you check out “Designing
Sound”. I do not think you will be disappointed.
Wishing you much fun and lots of luck in all your projects.
Andy Far nell, 2008
This is a textbook for anyone who wishes to understand and create sound
effects starting fr om nothing. It’s about sound as a process rather than sound
as data, a subject sometimes called “procedural audio”. The thesis of this book
is that any sound can be generated from first principles, guided by analysis and
synthesis. An idea evolving from this is, in some ways, s ounds so constructed
are more realistic and useful than reco rdings because they capture behaviour.
Although considerable work is required to create synthetic sounds with compa-
rable realism to recordings the rewards are astonishing. Sounds which are im-
possible to record become accessible. Transformations are made available that
cannot be achieved though any existing effects proc e ss. And fantastic sounds
can be created by reasoned extrapolation. This considerably widens the palette
of the traditional sound designer beyond mixing and effecting existing material
to include constructing and manipulating virtual sound objects. By doing so
the designer obtains something with a rema rkable property, something that has
deferred form. Procedural sound is a living sound effect that can run as c om-
puter code and be changed in real time according to unpredictable events. The
advantage of this for video games is enormo us , though it has equally exciting
applications for animations and other modern media.
About the book
Aims
The aim is to explore basic principles of making ordinary, everyday sounds using
a computer and easily available free software. We use the Pure Data (Pd) lan-
guage to construct sound objects, which unlike recordings of sound can be used